ROFL. you have no idea how inflation works. in inflation, all the numbers get bigger. profits are up all over the place for most sectors. wages are up all over the place, too. Panda Express is offering $30/hour here. the dollar has lost value. your attempt to single out the oil industry makes you look like an idiot.

>oil made expensive due to poor decisions by current western nationsm leaders (which that user supports unconditionally)
>zomg oil companies made profits

lmao

Increased profits are responsible for over half of the current inflation.

Labor and materials are less than 25%

the answer is of course simple. inflation has been factored into corporate price setting and is being used to scalp consumers, across all industries.

every day billions of people read "inflation at XX%", consumers expect inflated prices. this affects the supply/demand relationship in good's pricing. a raised price no longer affects demand as much as it did at the "real cost" inflated price, and if you push it a bit further the demand still doesnt nosedive. so they take the real cost inflated price, bump it up a bit more to increase profits, and consumer wealth is transferred to one of those 500 companies actually all owned by like 5 parent corporations.

Pretty much. Happened when Obamcare passed as well. Nothing went into effect until 2012 but tons of businesses put "Obamacare price increases" years ahead of time and then again in 2012 when they actually had to start paying benefits.

its funny that the same crowd that smirks and says "the CEO has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits" also balks at the idea they'd scalp based on inflation changing consumer pricing attitudes.

I heard a term a year or two ago called "economism".

Basically it's using economic arguments as the end-all of political discussions from people who just aren't that well versed in economics. Similar to the edgy atheists who don't really know much about science talking about how evolution disproves god, except in this case it's right wingers saying "of course you can't raise the minimum wage, don't you know supply demand curves?"

Really it boils down to using first approximations, like supply/demand curves, assuming all markets are perfectly elastic, etc. to justify what are almost always right-wing arguments, and never acknowledging that the rules of the market are determined by us and a totally artificial playing field we've created.

Then when you point out that minimum wage increasing unemployment has been debunked for over 20 years, and that an influx of low skill labor actually leads to increased wages, it's just dismissed as "not following basic economics", even though it's pretty easy to understand the economic reason.

It appeals to normies who aren't necessarily right wing by giving "common sense and universally accepted laws of economics" as the argument to abuse immigrants so they stop coming, or never raise the minimum wage or expand the social safety net.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Oct 27 2022 11:51am